


back to the future in a tardis

by mayachain



Series: 14valentines2016 [8]
Category: Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Community: 14valentines, Daydreaming, Gen, Past Character Death, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Relationship(s), Post-Series Pre-Movie, Time Travel, Trauma, What-If, past canon suicides
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 05:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5955751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people have time for mental health days. Mac - in her mind, at least - time travels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	back to the future in a tardis

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 14valentines' "Women and Physical/Mental Health" topic.

A few times a month after spending far too many hours at work Mac likes to pour herself a bath and a glass of champagne and soak in hot water and daydream.

Sometimes it’s about being given free reign and the perfect program she’d code. A game she’d design if she decided to take her skills in a completely different direction. 

Dates she’d like to have. Places she’d travel to. What she would do if she came across an opportunity to travel in time. Casting herself as the heroine who saves whomever it is from high school or college that she remembered that day - who died. (How? Time traveling dream Ghost World is just that awesome.)

The ghost of Cassidy always pops up.

On hard days after she’s talked to Veronica – or if Mr. Kane has seemed especially sad – Lily Kane will float to the top of her list. It would of course depend on how the time travel worked, on _when_ in the past she’d arrive. Could she help solve the murder sooner if she was flung into past Neptune shortly after? Mac would have skills over a decade ahead of any security system that exists at the time, so she’d have no problem hacking anything she could wish to. (She didn’t even know Lily except from afar, and yet so much of her social circle’s identity is tangled up in her death.)

Some dreams involve nothing more than giving her younger self – any self – a hug.

One time she spies Logan exiting a car as she drives past it and lies in her tub hours later wondering if a Mac zapped back in time would remember to save Lynn Echolls. Would she succeed, would Logan have a chance to live with his mother, or would Lynn simply then off herself by some other means? (It would be contingent on exactly when Aaron would be arrested for Lily’s murder, she thinks, on how Lynn would cope with being a murderer’s wife, and on how much of her suicide was directly because of Aaron – how depressed would Lynn Echolls have been had she been married to a much better man?)

In some scenarios Cindy Mackenzie steals herself enough money to last a life time and disappears from Neptune forever.

Hard-won years of therapy have taught her that she doesn’t _owe_ the ghost of Cassidy anything. Given the chance she would still aim to save him as much as would be possible depending on where he’d be on his timeline. Let him keep his innocence. Make him leave Veronica alone. Keep him from killing. _Not_ let him become younger Mac’s boyfriend. (Could she fall in… something… with Dick Casablancas, as she so very weirdly finds herself doing now, if said Richard junior did not undergo a hint of personality change after losing his brother?)

The older she gets the more Mac comes to the conclusion that she would have to try and coldly calculate how long she should wait and how much her friends would need to suffer before the fix would result in a universe she could even remotely predict and/or recognize. 

Preventing herself from being switched at birth never crosses her mind.

 

.


End file.
